Light After Darkness

Architect David Ziskind helps create a grand welcome for the public at the World Trade Center

By David McKay Wilson ’76

David Ziskind ’61 had a meeting scheduled for the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, at the World Trade Center in the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey’s offices on the 73rd floor.

David Ziskind ’61 at the World Trade Center Transportation Hub in New York, his latest project as chief architect at the firm STV Inc. The building features a concourse longer than Grand Central Station and a skylight that will open each year on September 11.

As fate would have it, that meeting was postponed. And for the past 15 years, Ziskind, chief architect at the international engineering and design firm STV Inc., has worked in every aspect of the rebuilding efforts at Ground Zero.

Ziskind’s STV team helped implement the vision of architect Santiago Calatrava, whose design evokes a bird in flight. The monumental World Trade Center Transportation Hub, with its cathedral-like white marble interior, features a grand concourse longer than Grand Central Terminal’s, and a canopy that reaches 160 feet high. Its crowning spine is a skylight that will open each year on September 11.

Through the skylight looms Tower 1 of the World Trade Center, for which STV was the construction manager. “There will be a wedge of light streaming down,” Ziskind said.

Wrote architecture critic Paul Goldberger of the Calatrava design: “New York City has built a truly sumptuous interior space for the benefit of the public.”

One late afternoon in July, Ziskind led a tour of the transit hub, which officially opened in May and, when completed by 2018, will serve about 200,000 commuters a day. He grinned when he saw commuters streaming across the white Carrera marble floor to the PATH rail platform or to 11 subway stops, which are connected by broad passageways that extend from the concourse. “What excites me is seeing all these people moving through here,” Ziskind said.

Ron Lem, the Transportation Hub’s senior project architect, said an important part of the execution of Calatrava’s design was Ziskind’s concern for the hub’s users. “Plus he’s got such charisma and style,” Lem said.

Building the $4-billion Transportation Hub presented significant engineering challenges. During construction, the MTA’s No. 1 subway line, which was high up in the subterranean parcel, and the New Jersey PATH station, much farther underground, had to remain open. Then came 9/11’s 10th anniversary and the demand that the plaza over the hub be ready for that ceremony. That required Ziskind’s team to ensure that the project could be built from the top down so it was completed in time. “It’s like you were building it in reverse,” he said.

At 77, Ziskind says he’s not ready for retirement. In July he was off to Iowa to meet with corrections officials regarding a women’s prison he has designed. His eyes light up when discussing the Fine Arts Library he’s designing with Austrian architect Wolfgang Tschapeller for Cornell University. Ziskind’s STV also designed a new residential barracks at the U.S. Military Academy Preparatory School at West Point.

Then there’s his company’s role as construction manager for the rebuilding of New York’s LaGuardia Airport terminal as well as the ongoing competition STV has entered for a new Penn Station, and the expansion of New York’s Javits Convention Center.

Ziskind became STV’s chief architect in 1994 after the company bought his firm. “When I had my own firm, I did everything but architecture as a psychologist, philosopher, accountant, and HR director,” he said. “Coming here was the best thing I ever did.”

Building Blocks

From art history at Colby to architecture in Florence,
Samantha Jaff’s path was set on Mayflower Hill

On the day before Samantha Jaff’s final review at the Yale School of Architecture, who randomly appears on a New Haven sidewalk but Colby Professor Emeritus David Simon, the art history scholar who supported Jaff’s decision to create an independent major in the field while on Mayflower Hill.

“I thought I was hallucinating,” said Jaff ’11, who received the school’s Sonia Albert Schimberg Prize for outstanding academic performance. “There I was, with my stress level so high, and he was exactly the person I wanted to see. I ran over and gave him the biggest hug.”

Jaff recalls taking Simon’s Survey of Western Art class during fall of her first year, and becoming captivated by art history. She also immersed herself in Simon’s classes in architectural history. When he became her academic advisor, they hatched the idea that she should create an independent major in architecture. Simon helped her find Syracuse University’s pre-architecture program in Florence, Italy. She took studio art classes, calculus, physics and studied design as well, ending up with a double major in art history and architecture.

“I was drawn to the field because it both allows and requires you to think critically across several different disciplines, simultaneously,” said Jaff, who lives in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood. “So for someone coming from a liberal arts background, it’s a dream. I enjoy its complexity.”

After working for two years at an architectural firm in Cambridge, Mass., assisting in the design of custom single-family homes, she was accepted at Yale, among the nation’s most competitive architecture schools.

The three-year Yale program provides myriad opportunities to design all sorts of buildings—most of which never get built. Her student projects included drawing up a school of design for the University of Pennsylvania, a gallery for contemporary art on the Croatian coast, a cultural dance center in New York’s meatpacking district, and an Amazon fulfillment center in Cincinnati.

Since June, she has worked in the Manhattan firm Davies Toews consulting on a project for superstar architect Frank Gehry. “I owe so much to Colby,” she said. “There’s not a thing that I’m doing today that I would be doing if not for David Simon and the liberal arts structure that Colby fosters.”